Keynote Speakers

Deen Freelon

Deen Freelon is an associate professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies political uses of social media and other digital technologies. He is also a principal researcher for UNC’s interdisciplinary Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). He has authored or co-authored more than 50 journal articles, book chapters and public reports, in addition to co-editing one scholarly book. An expert in multiple programming languages including R, Python, and PHP, Freelon has written research-grade software applications for a range of computational research purposes. He formerly taught at American University in Washington, D.C.

Martha Lane Fox

Martha Lane Fox is an entrepreneur and internet activist. She became a crossbench peer in the UK House of Lords in March 2013. In March 2014 she was appointed Chancellor of the Open University and in 2017 she was appointed  a member of the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy. From 2009 to 2013 Martha was Digital Champion for the UK and helped to create the Government Digital Service – this team launched gov.uk transforming government service delivery.

In 1998 Martha co-founded Europe’s largest travel and leisure website, lastminute.com, with Brent Hoberman. They took it public in 2000 and sold it in 2005.

Martha founded Doteveryone in 2015 after giving the Dimbleby Lecture on BBC1. Doteveryone started a responsible tech movement and in 2020 passed its tools and products to the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Open Data Institute to scale the work. Martha also co- founded and chairs LuckyVoice, revolutionising the karaoke industry.

Martha is a Director of Twitter and non-Executive Director of Chanel. She is also a non-Executive Director of Queens Commonwealth Trust. She is a Patron of AbilityNet, Reprieve, Camfed and Just for Kids Law.

In 2013 Martha was awarded a CBE.

Matthew Weber

Matthew S. Weber (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University and the Co-Director of the NetSci Network Science Lab. Dr. Weber is also a Tow Fellow at the Columbia Journalism School at Columbia University.

Dr. Weber is an expert on media industries, information ecosystems, and the use of large-scale Web data. In recent years, he has conducted extensive research on news media and social media use within local communities. Dr. Weber co-directs the 100 Communities Project, tracking news media production in small- and medium-sized communities in the United States across a five-year period. Further, Dr. Weber recently released findings from the first study to look at local news sharing and engagement using data provided directly by Facebook.

Dr. Weber’s work has been published in both academic and mainstream media, including numerous leading academic journals such as the Journal of Communication, American Behavioral Scientist, Communication Research, and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. His forthcoming edited volume, Networks, Knowledge Brokers, and the Public Policymaking Process, will be available in December 2021. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, Nieman Lab, Poynter, and numerous other media outlets including PBS. His research has been supported with funding from the National Science Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, Democracy Fund and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, with additional support from the Associated Press, Amazon, and Facebook.

Daniel J. Weitzner

Daniel J. Weitzner is 3Com Founders Principal Research Scientist, MIT CSAIL and Founding Director, MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative. His research interests include accountable systems, privacy, cybersecurity and online freedom of expression. He was United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy in the White House under President Obama, is a founder of the Center for Democracy and Technology, led the World Wide Web Consortium’s public policy activities, and was Deputy Policy Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2006, Weitzner co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative (now known as the Web Science Trust) with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Dame Wendy Hall, and Sir Nigel Shadbolt. Weitzner has a JD from Buffalo Law School and a BA in Philosophy from Swarthmore College. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund, recipient of the International Association of Privacy Professionals Leadership Award (2013), the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award (2016), was named a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (2019) and is a member of Council on Foreign Relations.

Jennifer Zhu Scott

Jennifer Zhu Scott is the Executive Chairman of The Commons Project, a nonprofit public trust established to build global digital infrastructure as public good. Prior, she was the founder of Radian Partners, focusing on direct investment in Artificial Intelligence and deep tech.

Jennifer was Forbes Word’s Top 50 Women in Tech in 2018. She is a China Fellow of the Aspen Institute and has a dual Fellowship at The Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) under the Asia Pacific Program and the Digital Society Initiative. She is a Council Member at the Data Policy Council of the World Economic Forum, where she served for the China Council and the Future of Blockchain Council. WEF named Jennifer as a Young Global Leader in 2013. Jennifer studied Applied Mathematics at Sichuan University and holds an MBA in Finance from Manchester Business School, where she earned distinction with her research on PE/VC in China and was awarded as a Distinguished Alumni. She completed the public policy and leadership program at Yale University in 2013, Harvard Kennedy School in 2016, and Oxford University in 2017. In 2018, she joins Princeton University’s inaugural executive education program focused on energy sustainability and leadership.

Jennifer is a frequent public speaker and published writer on AI, data ownership, and China’s digital monetary strategies. Her TED Talk on data ownership has more than 2 million views. In 2017, she debated against the notion of Universal Basic Income at Oxford Union. At Davos in 2018, she debated against Nobel Prize winner Prof. Robert Shiller and Swedish Central Bank Deputy Governor Cecilia Skingsley on Crypto Assets. She is the lead author or co-author of numerous White Papers by the World Economic Forum and a Senior Technical Consultant to the Season 5 and 6 of the HBO show Silicon Valley.

Spotlight Speakers

Sinan Aral

Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management, IT, Marketing and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a founding partner at Manifest Capital. He was the Chief Scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (from 2009 until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (from 2012 until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently on the Advisory Boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil. His new book, The Hype Machine, was published last September.

Azeem Azhar

Azeem Azhar (UK) explores the intersection of technology and society. He is the founder of Exponential View, the leading newsletter and podcast building which explores the political economy of the exponential age. He is also an active angel investor, with investments in AI, work-from-home, sustainability and online identity startups. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Digital Economy & Society, on the board of the Ada Lovelace Institute. Previously, he founded PeerIndex, a big data analytics firm which was acquired in 2015. He has had senior roles in global media businesses and started his career as a journalist where he was a writer for The Economist and The Guardian.

His first book will be published in autumn of 2021.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is a Research Professor at the Institute for Experiential AI of Northeastern University. He is also a part-time professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. Before, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from 2006 to 2016. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 1999 and 2011 (2nd ed), that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society and between 2012 and 2016 was elected to the ACM Council. Since 2010 is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989, and his areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, bias and ethics on AI, data science and algorithms in general.

He is actively involved as expert in many initiatives, committees or advisory boards related to Responsible AI all around the world: Global AI Ethics Consortium, Global Partnership on AI, IADB’s fAIr LAC Initiative (Latin America and the Caribbean), Council of AI (Spain) and ACM’s Technology Policy Subcommittee on AI and Algorithms (USA). He is also a co-founder of OptIA in Chile, a NGO devoted to algorithmic transparency and inclusion, and member of the editorial committee of the new AI and Ethics journal, where he co-authored an article on 

Dirk Brockmann

Dirk Brockmann is a German physicist and Professor at the Institute for Biology at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Robert Koch Institute, Berlin. Brockmann is known for his work in complex systems, complex networks, computational epidemiology, human mobility and anomalous diffusion.

Brockmann pioneered the scientific use of mass data collected in online games in a 2006 study in which he and his colleagues analyzed the geographic circulation of millions of dollar-bills registered at the online bill tracking website Where’s George? This study lead to the discovery of universal scaling laws in human mobility, the forecast of spreading routes of the 2009 flu pandemic in the United States and effective geographic borders in the United States. Brockmann also pioneered the development of computational models and forecast systems for the global spread of epidemics based on global air-transportation. In a 2013 study Brockmann and his colleague Dirk Helbing showed that complex global contagion phenomena can be mapped onto simple propagating wave patterns using the theoretical concept of effective distance. This method was employed for import risk estimates during the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa in 2014. Brockmann is one of the leading infectious disease modelers in Germany and advises the German government in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. in 2020 he initiated the German data donation project, in which more than half a million people donate daily data on heart rate, sleep and activity collected by wearable devices. This data has been used to design a fever monitor for Germany and predict the time course of the COVID-19 case counts in Germany.

Brockmann’s research has been featured in an episode of the American crime drama television series Numbers.

Since 2017 he has been publishing “Complexity Explorables”, which are interactive animations of complex systems.

Rory Cellan-Jones

Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC’s chief technology correspondent reporting on the biggest developments and news stories in the field. He has interviewed countless visionaries from Jeff Bezos to Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk to Tim Berners-Lee. He hosts the BBC weekly podcast Tech Tent and is the author of Dot.Bomb: The Strange Death of Dot.Com Britain and Always On: Hope and Fear in the Social Smartphone Era.

Rumman Chowdhury

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury’s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She is a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics, working with C-suite clients to create cutting-edge technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI since 2017.

She is currently the CEO and founder of Parity, an enterprise algorithmic audit platform company. She formerly served as Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence.

Rumman has been featured in international media, including the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, NPR, MIT Sloan Magazine, MIT Technology Review, BBC, Axios, Cheddar TV, CRN, The Verge, Fast Company, Quartz, Corrierre Della Serra, Optio, Australian Broadcasting Channel and Nikkei Business Times. She is a member of BrainTrust, a community of experts for Protocol, a tech magazine by Politico.

She is a multiple TedX speaker, a Forbes Tech contributing author and has been named by InformationWeek as one of 10 influential AI and machine learning experts to follow on Twitter. She was also named one of BBC’s 100 Women, recognized as one of the Bay Area’s top 40 under 40, and honored to be inducted to the British Royal Society of the Arts (RSA). She has also been named by Forbes as one of Five Who are Shaping AI.

Tat-Seng Chua

Dr Chua is the KITHCT Chair Professor at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University. Dr Chua was the Founding Dean of the School of Computing from 1998-2000. His main research interests include unstructured data analytics, multimedia information retrieval, recommendation and conversation systems, and the emerging applications in E-commerce, wellness and Fintech. He is the co-Director of NExT, a joint research Center between NUS and Tsinghua, focusing on Extreme Search.

Dr Chua is the recipient of the 2015 ACM SIGMM Achievements Award for the Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications. He is the Chair of steering committee of ACM ICMR (2015-19), and Multimedia Modeling (MMM) conference series. He was the General Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia 2005, ACM CIVR (now ACM ICMR) 2005, ACM SIGIR 2008, and ACM Web Science 2015. He serves in the editorial boards of three international journals. Dr. Chua is the co-Founder of two technology startup companies in Singapore. He holds a PhD from the University of Leeds, UK.

Damian Collins

Damian Collins, MP is the UK Conservative Party MP for Folkstone and Hythe. Mr Collins launched a high-profile inquiry as Chair of the Department of Culture Media & Sport Select Committee of the UK Houses of Parliament into disinformation and fake news in the wake of allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, which also investigated the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, and which lead to the UK Government publishing the Online Harms White Paper. He served as Chair from 2016 – 2019 and in March 2020 Collins co-founded a fact-checking service called Infotagion to counter COVID-related disinformation, and in September 2020 joined the Real Facebook Oversight Board.

Noshir Contractor

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, USA. He is also the President-Elect of the International Communication Association. He investigates how social and knowledge networks form and perform. He is a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association and a Fellow of the International Communication Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery. He received the Lifetime Service Award from the Organizational Communication & Information Systems Division of the Academy of Management. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras where he received a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. He has a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.

Honey Dacanay

Honey is the Executive Director with the Benefits Delivery Modernization Directorate at Employment and Social Development Canada. She has worked on transformation initiatives with the Canada School of Public Service Digital Academy and the Ontario Public Service, mostly in machinery of government reform. In 2019, she was named one of Apolitical’s “World’s 100 Most Influential People in Digital Government.”

Honey’s projects include: developing a data-driven approach to service delivery modernization in ESDC; leading development of the Discover Series, an introductory digital curriculum for Government of Canada public servants and contributing to the Teaching Public Servants in the Digital Age syllabus; co-designing and launching Open Call with Code for Canada and the Canadian Digital Service; and leading teams that pioneered digital learning, assessments, and enshrined Ontario’s digital service standards in landmark legislation, the Simpler, Faster, Better Services Act, 2019.

Meltem Demirors

An established veteran of digital asset investing, Meltem draws on her substantial experience and widespread influence to accelerate growth and acceptance of the asset class. Prior to joining CoinShares, Meltem helped build and grow Digital Currency Group, raising capital from the world’s largest corporations and managing a portfolio of 120 companies and 4 subsidiaries. Before she was bitten with the bitcoin bug, Meltem worked in the Oil & Gas industry in trading, corporate treasury,  and M&A roles.

Meltem has been recognized for her personal contributions to the industry and serves as an outspoken advocate. She is a founding member of the World Economic Forum Blockchain Council and testified before the House Financial Services Committee.

Meltem teaches at her alma mater MIT as well as Oxford, and when she isn’t talking about bitcoin, she can be found reading sci fi, engaging in extreme outdoor sports, or arguing with people on the internet.

Glenn Gore

25 years of Internet industry experience leading disruptive innovation at scale. In his current role, he is the group CEO for LemmaTree under Temasek as well as a board member for GoodWorker and Trustana. Affinidi is working on decentralized trust and self-sovereign identity solutions. 

Prior to LemmaTree/Affinidi Glenn was the Chief Architect for Amazon Web Services responsible for architectural best practices and technology thought leadership. 

Glenn has previously held leadership roles in OzEmail, UUNet, MCI/Worldcom, and WebCentral. Glenn is passionate about the role technology has in shaping how we live, work, and learn.

Andrea Guzman

Andrea L. Guzman is an assistant professor of communication at Northern Illinois University where her research focuses on Human-Machine Communication and people’s perceptions of artificial intelligence, including voice-based assistants and automated news-writing programs. Guzman is the inaugural chair of the Human-Machine Communication Interest Group of the International Communication Association. She is editor of Human-Machine Communication: Rethinking Communication, Technology, and Ourselves and co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of Human-Machine Communication (forthcoming). Guzman’s research has been published in top journals, including New Media & Society, Digital Journalism, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, andComputers in Human Behavior. Her award-winning research also has been presented at leading interdisciplinary and disciplinary conferences. https://andrealguzman.net

Wendy Hall

Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng is Regius Professor of Computer Science, Associate Vice President (International Engagement), and is an Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton.

With Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt she co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative in 2006 and is the Managing Director of the Web Science Trust, which has a global mission to support the development of research, education and thought leadership in Web Science.

She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year’s Honours list and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

She has previously been President of the ACM, President of BCS, Senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, was a founding member of the European Research Council and Chair of the European Commission’s ISTAG, was a member of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, and was a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on the Digital Economy.

Dame Wendy was co-Chair of the UK government’s Artificial Intelligence Review, which was published in October 2017, is the UK government’s first Skills Champion for AI and is a member of the newly formed AI Council.

In May 2020, she was appointed Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute.

Eszter Hargittai

Eszter Hargittai is Professor and holds the Chair of Internet Use and Society at the Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich. Her research looks at how people may benefit from their digital media uses with a particular focus on how differences in digital skills influence what people do online. Hargittai’s work has received awards from several professional associations, she is elected Fellow of the International Communication Association, and for her teaching, she received the Galbut Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award of the School of Communication at Northwestern University where she was the Delaney Family Professor before moving to Zurich. Her research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Google, Microsoft Research, Facebook, Nokia and Merck, among others. She is editor, most recently, of Research Exposed: How Empirical Social Science Gets Done in the Digital Age (Columbia University Press 2021). She has given invited talks in 18 countries on five continents. Hargittai holds a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University and a BA in Sociology from Smith College. She tweets @eszter.

Cyd Harrell

Cyd Harrell’s career spans 25 years in the technology industry, with stints at Aldus, Charles Schwab Electronic Brokerage, and as VP of Research Practice at Bolt | Peters (acquired by Facebook in 2012). During her time at Bolt | Peters, she conducted or oversaw more than 200 user research studies for all kinds of clients and research questions.

Since 2012, Cyd has focused on civic technology, working with the Center for Civic Design, where she led research for Field Guides 7, Designing election department websites, and Code for America, where she headed User Experience and then Product. Cyd joined the federal government’s 18F in 2016 and served as a Strategy Lead and then as 18F’s first Chief of Staff. Cyd is currently consulting as Service Design Lead with the Judicial Council of California, helping improve the UX of the civil justice system. She is the author of A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide.

James Hendler

James Hendler is the Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications and the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at RPI. He also is acting director of the RPI-IBM Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration and serves as a member of the Board of the UK’s charitable Web Science Trust. Hendler has authored over 400 books, technical papers and articles in the areas of Semantic Web, artificial intelligence, agent-based computing and high-performance processing. Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the AAAI, BCS, the IEEE, the AAAS and the ACM. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002. He is the first computer scientist ever to have served on the Board of Reviewing editors for Science. In 2010, Hendler was named one of the 20 most innovative professors in America by Playboy magazine and was selected as an “Internet Web Expert” by the US government. In 2013, he was appointed as the Open Data Advisor to New York State and in 2015 appointed a member of the US Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee. In 2016, became a member of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information and in 2018 became chair of the ACM’s US technology policy committee and was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Cameron Hickey

Cameron Hickey is the Director of the Algorithmic Transparency Institute at the National Conference on Citizenship.  He leads an effort to develop methodologies and tools for collecting and analyzing data to increase transparency about how large digital platforms impact society.

 Hickey was formerly a research fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School where he investigated the spread of mis- and dis-information on social media through the development of tools to identify and analyze problematic content. Hickey helped lead the Shorenstein Center’s Information Disorder Lab which monitored disinformation during the 2018 US Midterms.

 Previously, Hickey covered science and technology for the PBS NewsHour and NOVA with correspondent Miles O’Brien. Hickey has won a News and Documentary Emmy Award and a Newhouse Mirror Award for his journalism and was also a Knight Foundation Prototype Grantee for his junk news monitoring tool NewsTracker, and won a 2019 Brown Institute Magic Grant to investigate inauthentic activity on social media. His work has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, NOVA, Bill Moyers, American Experience, WNET, and The New York Times.

Lucy Hooberman

Lucy Hooberman is Professor Digital Media & Innovation at WMG, Warwick University. She joined Warwick in 2008 from a career in Industry at the BBC and in the Independent Production sector which grew with the birth of Channel4 TV in the UK. She was a documentary filmmaker, and then a Executive Producer as well as Commissioning Editor for Independent productions Factual Programmes at the BBC for five years. From 1998- 2008 she worked in Lord John Birt’s BBC Innovation Lab, BBC Imagineering, set up when he realised the internet was coming and the BBC had to adapt very quickly to this disruptive technology. She started research with BBC R&D leading a research team for the White Paper presented at the International Broadcasting Conference 2003 (IBC) in Amsterdam The Potential of Visual Navigation. She pioneered the use of user experience research with the NHS in England in an early web platform for the Strategic Health Authority in the West Midlands ten years later in 2013 and has researched user choice and patient data apps within the NHS from 2013- 2017. She is currently a Board Member of the English Folk and Dance Society (EFDSS) & a UK Committee Member of the Ethical Journalism Network, (EJN), a Member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, (BAFTA) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, (RSA). She’s also an advisor to the CoronavirusTech Handbook. Her latest article is The Frontline of Grief for Tortoise Media. She is also to be found on Twitter @LucyH and LinkedIn.

Sanjay Jain

At CIIE.co, Sanjay leads efforts to help create, promote, and encourage entrepreneurship in areas around digital technology – including the Bharat Inclusion Initiative that specifically works to bring people into the formal economy, and workforce in India.  He is also a partner at the Bharat Innovation Fund that invests in early stage companies.

As a volunteer with iSpirt, Sanjay has been a key contributor to help create, and evangelize various government apis, which are collectively referred to as the India Stack.  These APIs have led to a digitization of various processes, enabling them to go paperless, cashless and presenceless.

Sanjay is also the chair of the Technology board, for the Modular Open Source Identity Platform – MOSIP – that helps user organizations such as Governments implement a digital, foundational ID in a cost effective way, while embracing the best practices of scalability, security and privacy harnessing the power of open source.

Gabriele Kotsis

University professor of Computer Science at JKU Linz, President of ACM

Gabriele Kotsis is a Computer Science professor at Johannes Kepler University and an ACM Distinguished Member. She has organized ACM conferences and workshops, and in 2016 received an award in appreciation of her accomplishments regarding the ACM womENcourage conference series. Kotsis is a founding member of the ACM Europe Council, serving from 2008 to 2016. In 2014, she became an ACM Distinguished Member for her contributions to workload characterization for parallel and distributed systems, and for founding ACM Europe. Since 2016, she has been an elected Member-at-Large of the ACM Council.

Charles Kriel

Dr Charles Kriel, Associate Fellow, King’s Centre for Strategic Communications (KCSC), King’s College London is an author , filmmaker, strategist as well as a lifelong digital theorist & practitioner. He wrote a paper for a Nato Journal in 2017, then was hired by the DCMS Select committee on Fake News and Disinformation to support the investigations into Cambridge Analytica of 2018. He is a specialist in disinformation, behavioural design and radicalisation. He picked up on some evidence given by Cambridge Analytica , not noticed during the hearings, that lead to the making of People You May Know with his partner the director Katharina Gellein. He is currently working on a project with the Oxford Internet Institute and shooting a new film.

Ian Milligan

Ian Milligan is an associate professor of history at the University of Waterloo. His primary research focus is on how historians can use web archives, as well as the impact of digital sources on historical practice more generally. He is author of two monographs: History in the Age of Abundance (2019) and Rebel Youth (2014). Milligan also co-authored Exploring Big Historical Data (2015, with Shawn Graham and Scott Weingart) and edited the SAGE Handbook of Web History (2018, with Niels Brügger).

Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell is a researcher working on Ethical AI, currently focused on the ins and outs of ethics-informed AI development in tech. She has published over 50 papers on natural language generation, assistive technology, computer vision, and AI ethics, and holds multiple patents in the areas of conversation generation and sentiment classification. She previously worked at Google AI as a Staff Research Scientist, where she founded and co-led Google’s Ethical AI group, focused on foundational AI ethics research and operationalizing AI ethics Google-internally. Before joining Google, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research, focused on computer vision-to-language generation; and was a postdoc at Johns Hopkins, focused on Bayesian modeling and information extraction. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Aberdeen and a Master’s in computational linguistics from the University of Washington. While earning her degrees, she also worked from 2005-2012 on machine learning, neurological disorders, and assistive technology at Oregon Health and Science University. She has spearheaded a number of workshops and initiatives at the intersections of diversity, inclusion, computer science, and ethics. Her work has received awards from Secretary of State Ash Carter and the American Foundation for the Blind, and has been implemented by multiple technology companies. She likes gardening, dogs, and cats.

Katherine Ognyanova

Katherine Ognyanova is an associate professor at the School of Communication & Information, Rutgers University. Her research examines the effects of social influence on civic and political behavior, confidence in institutions, information exposure/evaluation, and public opinion formation. Ognyanova’s methodological expertise is in computational social science, network science, and survey research. Her recent work examines the links between misinformation exposure and political trust.  She is also a co-lead on The COVID States Project (covidstates.org) – a large multi-university initiative exploring the social and political implications of COVID-19. You can visit Ognyanova’s website at www.kateto.net or follow her on Twitter at @Ognyanova.

JP Rangaswami

JP was appointed Chairman of the Web Science Trust in December 2019; he is also a Trustee on the board of Cumberland Lodge and a governor of Hammersmith Academy. Having retired from full-time employment in 2018 after turning 60, JP also serves on the boards of a major media company, a bank and a FTSE 100 insurer. Till September 2018 he was Chief Data Officer and Head of Innovation of Deutsche Bank; prior to that he was Chief Scientist of  Salesforce.com (2010-2014) and of BT (2006-2010). From 1997 to 2006 he was at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, where he was Global CIO from 2001-2006. He is an Adjunct Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and of the Royal Society for the Encouragements of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. His TED Talk, “Information is Food” has been viewed on ted.com alone more than 700,000 times. Mr. Rangaswami holds a Degree in Economics and Statistics from St. Xavier’s College.

Gordon Ross

Gordon Ross is Vice President and Partner at OXD, one of Canada’s oldest digital agencies, where he has led projects for the past 25 years. Gordon pioneered OXD’s service design practice with a focus on public sector organizations and digital transformation. 

His portfolio includes extensive work with BC and Alberta’s Justice sector working to improve the courts, projects that apply ethnography and design to public transit fare policy in Vancouver (TransLink) and the San Francisco Bay Area (MTC), and support for innovative digital units in government, including BC’s Government Digital Experience and Exchange Lab, Alberta’s Digital Innovation Office, and the Canadian Digital Service. 

He co-founded the Vancouver User Experience community of practice in 2004, is a Regional Advisor of Service Design Canada, a former Trustee of the Vancouver Public Library, and was External Advisory for the City of Vancouver’s Digital Strategy. Gordon has presented at Service Design in Government, SXSW, and the Service Design Network’s Global conference. He recently published an article on legal design in MIT’s Design Issues, the academic journal of design history, theory, and criticism.

Nigel Shadbolt

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science. He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 2009 he was appointed Information Advisor by the Prime Minister and, working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, led the development of the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk website. In 2010, he joined the UK government’s Public Sector Transparency Board – overseeing Open Data releases across the public sector. He was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’. 

At Oxford he has centred his research in human centred AI in a wide range of applications.  Most recently he was asked to lead the setting up of the Oxford Institute of Ethics in AI.

With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web.  In 2018 he published The Digital Ape: how to live (in peace) with smart machines, described as a ‘landmark book’.

He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.

Amanda Stent

Amanda Stent is the NLP architect in the data science group in the office of the CTO at Bloomberg. Previously, she was a director of research and principal research scientist at Yahoo Labs, a principal member of technical staff at AT&T Labs – Research, and an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University. Her research interests center on natural language processing and its applications. She holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Rochester. She is co-editor in chief of ACL Rolling Review, has authored over 100 papers on natural language processing and is co-inventor on over thirty patents and patent applications.

Jie Tang

Jie Tang is a Professor and the Associate Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. His interests include artificial intelligence, data mining, social networks, and machine learning. He served as General Co-Chair of WWW’23, and PC Co-Chair of WWW’21, CIKM’16, WSDM’15, and EiC of IEEE T. on Big Data and AI Open J. He leads the project AMiner.org, an AI-enabled research network analysis system, which has attracted more than 20 million users from 220 countries/regions in the world. He was honored with the SIGKDD Test-of-Time Award, the UK Royal Society-Newton Advanced Fellowship Award, NSFC for Distinguished Young Scholar, and KDD’18 Service Award.

Jaime Teevan

Jaime Teevan is Chief Scientist for Microsoft‘s Experiences and Devices, where she is charged with creating the future of productivity. Previously she was the Technical Advisor to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where she led the Productivity team. Dr. Teevan uses AI to help people accomplish their goals, developing the first personalized search algorithm used by Bing and introducing microproductivity into Office. Her research has earned her theTechnology Review TR35 Young Innovator, Borg Early Career, Karen Sparck Jones, and SIGIR Test of Time awards. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT and a B.S. from Yale, and is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

Meet the authors

Wendy Hall

Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng is Regius Professor of Computer Science, Associate Vice President (International Engagement), and is an Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton.

With Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt she co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative in 2006 and is the Managing Director of the Web Science Trust, which has a global mission to support the development of research, education and thought leadership in Web Science.

She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year’s Honours list and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

She has previously been President of the ACM, President of BCS, Senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, was a founding member of the European Research Council and Chair of the European Commission’s ISTAG, was a member of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, and was a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on the Digital Economy.

Dame Wendy was co-Chair of the UK government’s Artificial Intelligence Review, which was published in October 2017, is the UK government’s first Skills Champion for AI and is a member of the newly formed AI Council.

In May 2020, she was appointed Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute.

Kieron O’Hara

Kieron O’Hara is an Emeritus Fellow at the University of Southampton, specialising in Web Science and the effects of the Web on privacy, trust and political interaction. He is the author of fifteen books, of which the latest is Four Internets (OUP, with Wendy Hall), to be published in July. He is a former director of the Southampton Web Science Institute, and co-wrote a number of seminal Web Science texts, including ‘A Framework for Web Science’ with Tim Berners-Lee et al. Together with Niko Tsakalakis and Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, he was awarded Best Paper at the 8th ACM WebSci Conference in Hannover.